C. KONIG-PRALONG, Dream bodies and infernal bodies. Sleep in Augustine. Sleep and dreams in ancient knowledge. RThPh 2011/II, p. 145-160.
In ancient culture, dreams were the vehicle of prophecy and divination. In philosophy, they offered to various sceptics an argument in favour of solipsism, meaning the impossibility of discriminating between the intra-mental world of consciousness and an eventual exterior world. In Augustine, neither of these two uses of dreams is important. The dreamed world acquires rather an ontological and moral dimension, in the context of a theological anthropology accentuating more and more the corporal dimension of humankind. As a medial world, the imagination possesses the same type of being as the infernal. The necessary tying of the human soul to the body presupposes that the soul separated from the physical body immediately acquires a body of substitution, an imaginary body, in order to continue to live, suffer and sin in dreams, as in Hell.